Puketrick Bile

Patrick Kyle, a.k.a. Puketrick Bile, is an illustrator from Toronto, Canada. He has authored several comic books, and is co-founder of Wowee Zonk, a comic anthology, and founder of Mother Books, a comic and art book publishing house. Why “Mother”? “I liked the way it looked when I wrote it down,” he said.
Although the artist and I are both in our 20s, I’m findinig it difficult not to look at his work with a mother’s eyes.

Prying through Kyle’s portfolio and Flickr album feels like peeking over your son’s shoulder as he doodles in a notebook during class, I imagine. Bodily excretions, tattoos, baseball caps, weapons, genitalia, monsters… anything a (stereo)typical adolescent boy might be interested in, Kyle draws in great detail. And then paints without worrying about staying in the lines. The result resembles, appropriately, the mellow tones and subtle texture of coloured pencils or felts.

Maybe Kyle is playfully and half-heartedly trying to shock his audience, especially with pieces such as “Brat”, a deliberately crude – in more than one sense – caricature of Bart Simpson. Or maybe he’s playfully and half-heartedly poking fun at artists who are still trying to shock (how banal!) their audiences. I can’t help but suspect that Kyle is poking fun at his audience, too, as his characters mischievously avert their huge half-oval eyes, and conceal their smiles behind cowls (think black mage from the Final Fantasy video game series), scarves, or nose-picking fingers.